Early Modern Theatre and the Culture of Collectin

This dissertation examines the interrelation of private practices of curiosity collecting and public theatre in early modern England. It argues that the geographic, cultural, and economic proximity of urban curiosity collections and public playhouses provide the theatre with a unique set of objects and techniques with which to explore the prominent discursive conflicts of the period. It assesses the particularities of English curiosity collecting, and it works to emphasize the unique aspects of the English practice in reference to dominant European paradigms while acknowledging the distinctly international flavor of the London collecting community. It addresses the common interactive framework of English collecting and public theatre, and it locates both practices within a mutual imaginative and recreational urban environment.;In particular, this dissertation engages the multiple ways that plays and playtexts employ the techniques, interests, and rhetorics of curiosity collecting in examinations of national identity and self-estrangement, the relationship between gender and property, court spectacle and Jacobean absolutism, and the material collection and sale of printed plays. Engaging texts by Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, Rowley, and others, it extends New Historicism's interest in early modern curiosity collection as a symptom of colonial expansion to an examination of the material, experiential, and imaginative collaboration of a distinct urban collecting practice and its neighboring dramatic enterprise.;Ultimately, "Early Modern Theatre and the Culture of Collecting" provides the study of early modern playmaking and early modern material cultures with a more precise understanding of the interactive domains of public theatre and curiosity collection. It extends what is too often an amusing aside in English dramatic studies---the analogous though uncertainly related practice of material curiosity collection---to a dynamic and interactive cultural practice. This dissertation determines that the collection operates as an imaginative catalyst for the theatre. It provides a complex referential framework for new and familiar cultural investigations, stocked with new objects, new processes, and a new vocabulary with which the theatre can explore itself and its surrounding social and cultural landscape.